Miss Manners.

Victorian Technique To Combat Family Strife

June 08, 2000

Dear Miss Manners: My daughter is living with a man she met a few years ago. Not too long ago, he legally married a woman from another country, with my daughter's consent, to get her into the United States. My daughter and he plan to marry in a couple of years when he annuls his marriage to this other woman, whom he has no relationship with except on paper.

In the meantime, my daughter is now expecting her first child by this man.

As soon-to-be grandparents, my husband and I are grieving over the circumstances into which our grandchild will be born and over the immoral and illegal choices our daughter and this man have made. We have considered turning him in. For now, he is not welcome in our home until he straightens things out. The climate is icy between us because my husband and I have taken a stand against his actions.

Is there any etiquette advice for parents in a situation like this?

Gentle reader: As a matter of fact, there are two relevant approaches within the realm of manners, neither of which will relieve you of your grief.

Miss Manners is sorry about that. Politeness does often make rough situations smooth, but this one is too rough to be paved over.

The first approach is to continue demonstrating your disapproval through coldness to your daughter and a refusal to associate with the father of her child. The law has many punishments at its command, but manners has only the ability to isolate people in violation of its standards. And although being "non-judgmental" evolved into the semblance of a moral position in recent decades, it is only now people are beginning to notice that standards deteriorate rapidly when there are no social consequences.

The second approach is a pragmatic one, in which you first ask yourself what you hope to accomplish personally in this particular case. You are unlikely to succeed in disrupting the arrangement unless you bring in the law, and if you did, your grandchild would grow up without a father. What you would almost certainly do would be to estrange yourselves from your daughter and her child.

The polite way to avoid this need not involve conferring a false approval on the arrangement. Rather, you would employ the extremely useful but forgotten Victorian technique of simply refusing to acknowledge the existence of what you cannot hope to change. This means receiving them all politely, but refusing to be drawn into any discussion of their choices, especially any attempts to justify them. If you are gracious to them in everyday matters, they may be willing, or even relieved, to obey your declaration that they already know how you feel, and you don't want to hear about it.

Understanding that you are torn between your conscience and your child and cannot satisfy both, Miss Manners recommends the second choice as the less painful one.

Dear Miss Manners: Prior to moving to a new job, I wrote letters of appreciation to some of my clients, bidding farewell and asking for letters of reference if they were pleased with my services.

Some have called with well-wishes and promises of letters. As these letters come in, should I then write thank-yous? I want to balance appreciation with closure and moving on. Your advice is appreciated.

Gentle reader: So is your interest in thank-you letters. Miss Manners so rarely has the opportunity of warning people not to overdo them.

The danger here, as you have guessed, is their thinking you are not moving on, and that they will therefore be expected to do yet another favor. Therefore a quick note saying that the letter was of great help is better than a saga that itself seems to require acknowledgment.